Month: February 2019

In which I am in the presence of excellence

On By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching2 Comments

Just a quick note today again, because while I made it to work today and got through the entire day I’m still feeling pretty shit: we had a parent-teacher conference today. It was prescheduled, mind you, as it’s the time of year for these things, so it’s not like it was one of those YOU MUST COME IN NOW AND DISCUSS YOUR CHILD WITH US sorts of things.

I think the highest compliment I can possibly pay to my son’s teachers is that they make me miss teaching. I mean, in general the quality of the staff at Hogwarts is pretty damn high, but I am going to seriously miss him being in first grade with the teachers that he has, and– and I say this without even knowing the names of the second grade teachers, so I could very well be wrong– we are going to seriously have to prepare for a letdown next year, because there’s just no way he’s lucky enough to get people this good in charge of his education two years in a row.

I mean, yeah, it didn’t take that long of having a non-education job for me to miss being around education and around kids, but moments in the past two or three years where I missed teaching itself are vanishingly rare. And every time I sit down with these folks I spend the entire conversation thinking yes, that’s exactly how you should handle that and yes, that’s exactly what I tried to do on my best days in this job and yes, that’s exactly the sort of mind-set I want you to have about my son, who is smart as hell but who is manifestly not perfect and absolutely has any number of things that we want him to try harder and do better with.

And it’s every single conversation I have with them. I just hope he realizes how fucking lucky he is. I wish everyone had teachers this good.

Proof of slightly alive

On By Luther M. SilerIn life4 Comments

Monday night, when we went to bed, we decided to leave a window open to produce perfect sleepin’ weather in the room. Tuesday morning I woke up with a cold– one of those things where there’s no getting sick process, just oh, I guess I’m sick.

I got home from work on Tuesday and went to bed. Immediately. I woke up at 3:45 AM and called in sick then went back to bed until about 45 minutes ago, when my family got home and I moved into the living room. I doubt it will be more than another couple of hours until I’m in bed again.

Whee.

In which white people make terrible decisions

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy, PoliticsLeave a comment

I seriously thought Ralph Northam’s stupid lying racist ass was the dumbest thing I was going to encounter this week, I really did. He issued what I thought was a pretty decent apology the night that the blackface/Klan picture broke, and I almost– almost– thought that maybe he shouldn’t have to immediately resign.

Well, fuck me for giving a racist a second’s benefit of the doubt, because the very next morning this asshole is not only trying to take back his admission that it was him in the picture, he “defends himself” by saying he wasn’t in blackface that time but there was this other time that he did it and man, isn’t shoe polish hard to get off your face?

So fuck that guy. He can go. Ain’t nobody gonna miss him.

(I won’t be entertaining a lot of debate on this point, for the record. We can lose everybody who ever wore blackface, period. I don’t give a fuck who you are or when you did it. I can’t believe that not only am I still having this fucking conversation, but it’s like the third time in a few weeks.)

And then I log onto Twitter for a moment during my lunch break and I get to play the Dead or an Asshole? game, since Liam Neeson is trending for some fucking reason. A wise man once said that the Internet plays a game where every day a new person is chosen as the Main Character of the Internet, and you win the game if that person is never you.  So, Liam lost the game today.

And Liam’s story kinda had me fucked up for a minute, you know? Because– and stay with me, here, because I’m phrasing this carefully– I very much do get the feeling that something terrible has happened to someone you care about, and you weren’t able to do anything about it. I very much do get the idea that in response to that trauma he went a little crazy for a little while. That’s not the problem.

No, the problem for Neeson is that he phrases this whole thing in terms of revenge, which … uh, randomly walking around with a club in your pocket and hoping that somebody black starts shit with you isn’t actually revenge, Liam. That’s racism. It’s not revenge when somebody does something to you or someone you care about and you beat the hell out of somebody who maybe sorta looks like the person who did it. That’s not what that word means. And from what I’ve read, he didn’t seem to recognize that distinction at all during his deeply weird interview for a movie that I already wasn’t going to see because I can’t tell if it’s a revenge fantasy or some sort of weird, fucked-up Fargo-level black comedy shit. Nothing about Cold Pursuit was worth this shit. Nothing.

I mean, ultimately I think Neeson’s gonna skate on this, because the story basically just boils down to I had some terrible racist thoughts for a while that didn’t lead to any actual actions, and that’s not enough to have a serious effect on his career unless it turns out he’s got some stories in his past where he did do some shady shit. I’ll call it 50-50 that that happens, we’ll see. But … dude? Why the hell did you decide to tell this story in the first place? This is shit for your shrink, not a goddamned junket interview!

We also watched the first half of the Netflix Fyre Festival documentary last night, a process so horrifying that my wife legitimately looked over at me and asked if I was okay a couple of times. It’s not even Tuesday, y’all, and I have had enough stories of stupid white people to last me until next Black History Month, thanks. We can be done now.

Monthly Reads: January 2019

On By Luther M. SilerIn Photography, Reading3 Comments

This is gonna be a thing now, until I get tired of it and stop.  Here are the books I read in January, less the two that I DNFed and a beta read that you will hear about eventually.

#REVIEW: FOR THE KILLING OF KINGS, by Howard Andrew Jones

On By Luther M. SilerIn Reading, Reviews1 Comment

I have praised Howard Andrew Jones’ writing here before– his The Desert of Souls was on my 10 Best list for 2017, and I also enjoyed its sequel The Bones of the Old Ones, although I don’t think I reviewed it here at all. So when I got a chance to land an ARC of the first book of his new trilogy, For the Killing of Kings, I jumped on it. This isn’t out until February 19, so when I’m done telling you you should pre-order it, you can just go do that and have it on release day in a couple of weeks! Great how this works, isn’t it?

The word “Conan” always comes up when I’m discussing Jones’ books, and his work always does a great job of scratching that particular itch for me– straightforward sword & sorcery full of magic and violence and cool worldbuilding and prophecies and scary villains and interesting monsters. Jones’ flavor of sword and sorcery is decidedly more modern than the traditional Conan model– you’ll notice that the woman on the cover is wearing clothes, for example– and not only is the main character a woman but so are several important members of the supporting cast.

That said, this series actually feels a bit less Conan-esque than his previous books, despite being set in a more European-style setting than The Desert of Souls and The Bones of the Old Ones, which were both deeply influenced by the Arabian Nights. In a lot of ways, For the Killing of Kings has the feel of a murder mystery for a decent chunk of its length– it’s not quite a true murder mystery, because the reader knows who did the killing, but the book splits its time among three distinct groups of characters, two of whom are pursuing the third, and no one really has the full story about what’s going on until close to the end. The characters are the best thing about the book, honestly; everyone who gets screen time has their own motivations and goals, and most of the time those motivations and goals don’t overlap perfectly with everyone else in the story, so the conflicts keep multiplying and mounting until all the sudden at the end of the book we’re pretty sure that the government all of the main characters are supposed to defend is at least partially the bad guys and oh by the way there’s a whole invasion thing going on and the scope of the book widens rather quite a lot. This is a great rollicking landslide of a book; every little plot-pebble that happens sends a bigger rock rolling down the hill, and Jones never lets up on moving the plot relentlessly forward.

It’s tricky, when writing a trilogy, to set up the first book so that it tells its own story but introduces story threads that will continue into subsequent tales, and For the Killing of Kings does a great job of keeping the scope smaller until the end and then abruptly pulling the camera way back and massively upping the stakes for the remainder of the series. I will be buying my own copy of this to put on the shelf next to my ARC. You should too.

In which I leave the house

On By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching1 Comment

We just got back from Doing a Thing, the annual Science Alive! event at the main branch of the St. Joseph County Public Library in downtown South Bend. This is the third year my wife has taken my son; I didn’t go the last two years because I was working every Saturday. It’s an interesting event; they basically take over the library with tons of booths and exhibits (too many, honestly; there’s stuff everywhere you turn, and tons of people, and I was stressed out from trying to keep from bumping into people or knocking little kids over) and most of them are hands-on in some way or another, which is pretty cool.

The ground floor was basically a mini-4H fair, with a lot of vaguely bemused-looking farm kids letting the terrified city folk do stuff like pet chickens, with the occasional pig or snake thrown in for good measure.

The upper floors were more … science-fair-ish, I guess? Not in the sense of people showing off experiments, but more like lots of table staffed by local college kids demonstrating some aspect of SCIENCE! to the kids. The weird thing was a lot of the time the science they were wanting to talk about was miles beyond the comprehension level of the small kids (my son is 7, and he was about average for the crowd, and there were a lot of kids way younger) who were there. I spent a couple of minutes watching some poor woman who is probably an excellent teacher when she’s surrounded by college students who want doctorates gamely struggling to relate square dancing and mathematics and fractions to each other … somehow? She literally had a whiteboard covered with equations next to her and I had to keep myself from bursting out laughing when she, entirely seriously, asked the group of elementary-age kids in front of her who wanted to square dance what the negative reciprocal of 1/2 was.

I would wager that, if you threw out the actual scientists, no more than 10% of the adults in the building could tell you what a negative reciprocal is. I mean, it’s not a difficult concept, but it’s not one of those things that most folk need to worry about, y’know? Then there was an entire room full of particle physics folks and one lonely astronomer. And, like, okay, radiation’s cool, and particle accelerators are cool, and whatever the spinny ball-balancy thing that my son was so enthralled with was neat, but I found myself wondering if anybody at all was thinking about age-appropriateness when they put this all together. Waving a hand-made Giger counter at a piece of Fiestaware is pretty neat, but I’m pretty certain that despite a valiant effort at explaining radioactivity by the two Ph.D candidates behind the table, it really didn’t get anywhere with my kid.

So. Yeah. Interesting event, but they maybe need to think a bit harder about the age group they’re pitching to and how they’re going to do that in the future.

In which I’m dumb again

On By Luther M. SilerIn TeachingLeave a comment

School was back in session today, finally, albeit with a two-hour delay to let the last of the below-zero temperatures bleed away before the kids had to be outside waiting for buses. Unsurprisingly, facing a shortened Friday after three days off something like 48% of the student body opted to not bother coming to school, so it was really peaceful around the building today.

I showed up for work today in a button-down grey shirt, sleeves rolled up (I always roll up my sleeves; I despise the feeling of fabric on my lower arms for some reason,) with a blue-and-purple Jerry Garcia tie and a brand-new purple sweater vest. It marked the first time in my life I’d ever deliberately worn a sweater vest, and my last thought after looking in the mirror before going to work was I have never looked more like a middle-aged middle school teacher in my life than I do right now.

I didn’t mean to buy the goddamn sweater vest. It was literally a stupid accident. I was at the fat man store last week sometime buying T-shirts (as it turns out, my policy of buying shirts at the cons I go to has put me in a position where most of my wearable T-shirts are con shirts now, and I needed to reassert the proper solid-color balance) and I saw the sweater on a table on the way out. I liked the color and the subtle pattern and I bought it on a whim, not realizing until I got home and unfolded it to hang up that it was a damn sweater vest. I don’t even know why I dislike sweater vests so much; it’s an irrational prejudice but I still have it.

A sensible person would have just returned the sweater; I’m keeping it out of spite. Against, apparently, myself and my own bad decisions.

And then two different kids over the course of the day compared me to Rick Ross, who, if you don’t know, is the dude in the picture up there, a picture I obtained by Googling “Rick Ross sweater vest”. One might think that that might be a sign that sweater vests are perhaps his thing, but no, it turns out shirtlessness is more his thing, and I will never as long as I live be photographed shirtless, full-body torso tattoos or not. I think the kids probably thought they were making fun of me, but I feel like any day where I walk out of the house thinking I could not possibly look more like a middle-aged middle-school teacher and then get compared to a famous and wealthy rapper is a good day even if the main point of comparison is that we’re both fat and bald and have bushy beards. I’ll take what I can get, dammit.